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Making people laugh after one quick glance is what a cartoonist has to do with each new drawing.

Times change and what's funny one decade might not be so funny the next, but The New Yorker has managed to keep people laughing at its cartoons for the better part of a century.

Bob Mankoff has been cartoon editor of the magazine since 1997 and he will be at the Westport Library on Thursday, March 27, to talk about his new illustrated memoir, "How About Never -- Is Never Good for You?" (Henry Holt, $23.57). The book's title comes from the caption of the author's most famous cartoon, in which a frustrated businessman gives an associate the brush-off.

In an interview last week, Mankoff said the challenge for the last 17 years has been publishing cartoons that readers believe are up to the great New Yorker tradition while presenting fresh ways to be funny.

"Humor changes, like music, like taste. If you look back to the 19th century and people like Mark Twain, you will understand the humor, but it's not actually funny anymore," he said from his Manhattan office.

"Cartoons are in the DNA of The New Yorker. (The magazine) respects cartoons. They're fact checked and (editor) David (Remnick) makes the final selection. That's a ritual and a tradition from the very beginning," Mankoff said.

"Other magazines didn't have that tradition, but it has continued here whether Bob Gottlieb, Tina Brown or David was the editor. If all of a sudden there were no cartoons, the crowds would be at the castle gates with pitchforks," Mankoff said, chuckling, of the enduring place of comic art in one of the country's most respected magazines.

There have only been two cartoon-less issues in the history of the magazine -- the week in 1946 when most of the magazine was dedicated to John Hersey's "Hiroshima" and the week after 9/11.

Unlike snark or putdowns directed at other people, New Yorker cartoons are meant to tweak the customers.

"It's always been the kind of humor that reflects back at the very class that is reading the magazine. It's never a case of looking down at people who are considered inferior. If you look at (the British magazine) Punch in the 19th century, all of the jokes are about the Irish. With the New Yorker, it's all about our own foibles," he said. A fairly recent Bill Haefeli cartoon in the book illustrates this philosophy with a little girl huddling under a beach umbrella and asking her mother, "If it's not safe to go in the water and it's not safe to go in the sun, why did you bring me here?"

Mankoff said that he and his crew of cartoonists "stage our own little parallel universe. And the magazine gives its imprimatur to it. Sometimes it's as crazy as Monty Python and sometimes it's as observational as Jerry Seinfeld."

Mankoff drew cartoons for the magazine for 20 years before he was tapped to replace the legendary Lee Lorenz who ran the department for three decades.

"It was a natural transition for me -- a player who becomes the manager. Not every cartoonist wants to be an editor who has to keep looking, looking, looking at humor. But with my background in psychology I've always been fascinated by what made (things funny). It's too important not to analyze. Too important for our culture. Too important for our psychological health."